Bones (2001)


director: Ernest Dickerson
release-year: 2001
genres: horror, comedy
countries: USA
languages: English

Somebody thought a Snoop Dogg music video should be turned into a feature-length horror film, and somebody was exactly right.

Bow wow wow.

1970s Snoop Dogg was the resident drug dealer, but something has gone awry and now it's modern day and there's an old man shooting at a demon dog who eats dumb white guys who don't know how to buy drugs on the street.

Possibly a demon dogg.

A group of misguided youth buy the demon dog's haunted mansion with the dream of spiffing it up, turning it into a nightclub, and impressing their business-suit-wearing dad with their unexpected business chops. Kids.

It's so hard to be a parent.

The local fortune teller and her sexy daughter swing by to tell them their nightclub is haunted and they should go back to the suburbs, but they unsurprisingly don't listen to her. They do start hitting on the sexy daughter, and she starts coming around to the haunted mansion daily despite a moderately strong belief that it is, in fact, haunted.

Fortune tellers can't get no respect.

They find the demon dog in a bedroom, feed it a burger, and keep it as a pet.

Even demons have to eat.

It's a comedy-horror, but it's generally not a comedy and a horror. It kind of alternates back and forth between being one or the other, depending on the scene.

Not following the unix philosophy.

The animators are having a blast projecting ghosts and shadows on the walls. The throbbing mass of sticky demon people is particularly well done.

A bit of clay beats CGI any day.

Eventually we learn that several of the townsfolk, including the fortune teller and the dad, covered up the violent murder of Snoop Dogg in a crack-based business deal gone wrong. Snoop's body was buried under the haunted mansion, but his Dogg spirit lived on in theā€¦ well, you know, the dog.

Because of that music video.

They get reunited and Snoop comes back for revenge.

It's mostly an excuse to wear neat hats.

As we've seen in other demonic revenge films, i.e. Velvet Buzzsaw (2019), they burned all of their screentime on buildup and really have to jog through the remaining violence.

This one takes itself considerably less seriously.

There's little rhyme or reason to who dies how, but they all die, of course.

Hell hath no fury like a Dogg scorned.